The friend zone is nothing new, for even Hades, god of the underworld, could only get his love Persephone to come hang out with him by feeding her pomegranate seeds; but an event in 2013 ensured that the “friend zone” was here to stay: It was added to the Oxford English Dicitonary. noun informal a situation in which a platonic relationship exists between two people, one of whom has an undeclared romantic or sexual interest in the other: I always wind up in the friend zone, watching them pursue other guys Now, to be fair, we can’t be sure of the context of these photos; we may have just caught an otherwise happily together couple at an awkward moment, but unfortunately in these pictures they epitomize that 10th circle of Hell that Dante woefully omitted, the “friend zone.”